Dr. Kimberly Engle received her B.S. in Astronomy from Case Western Reserve University in 1990. During her time at Case she worked in a biochemistry lab, assisted astronomy professors N. Sanduleak and C. B. Stephenson with their Northern Sky Survey by producing finders charts, and performed research in cosmic string theory in Dr. Robert Brown's group.
Kimberly's studies of Physics and Astrophysics at with Dr. Steve McMillan at Drexel University culminated with a PhD thesis in 1999 entitled "Numerical Simulations of Globular Clusters." Because her thesis required a great deal of computing power, in grad school she began learning about specialized methods for writing "fast" code (i.e. programming using parallel computing languages) and for creating hardware with built-in code. This research imparted Kimberly with computer experience on a variety of operating systems and using many computer languages and software packages, both scientific and general.
Her technical expertise combined with a science research background led to her position in the Astrophysics Science Division as a computer systems administrator and part-time astrophysicist. She then moved to the Solar System Exploration Division where she was the lead sysadm for such mission at Cassini CIRS and Curiosity's SAM instrument. Her primary research projects include studying AGN outflows and examining the infrared properties BAT-selected AGN.